


Aesthetic

by HarrysBoyLouis



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Disease, Harry Styles - Freeform, High School, Hospital, Louis Tomlinson - Freeform, M/M, Short Story, larry stylinson - Freeform, nautical tattoos, one direction - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:52:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5533736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarrysBoyLouis/pseuds/HarrysBoyLouis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry and Louis shouldn't have worked out.<br/>They just shouldn't have.</p><p>or the one where Harry's a flower child with a disease, and Louis' skin becomes their story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aesthetic

-H's POV-

His aesthetic was black and white blogs with depressing quotes, and blurred out pictures. He didn't think about giving each and every person a chance at a first impression, or how many experiences the world was holding for him. He didn't wear bright colors, and he didn't like wandering around art exhibits - noticing that as the paintings got darker the brush strokes grew more aggressive and obstructive.

We shouldn't have worked out.

People say that it was bound to happen; that opposites attract, and our mutual infatuation was bound to spiral into something more. 

But he doesn't believe in opposites. He believes that everything coincides with it's supposedly opposite action. You can't go into one room without going out of another. You can't empty your lunch tray without filling the garbage. You can't love everyone unconditionally without losing some of the love you should have been saving for yourself. 

And while other people give him odd looks, and teachers frown disapprovingly, I smile; because as I lie here in a hospital bed nearly a year after him crashing into my life, and tearing my pastel pink wallpaper away to reveal the infinite gray underneath I realize what I had spent too long trying to deny - he was right.

The universe works in twisted ways, but the stories that result lie flat and open where anyone can read or mark them - altering the last words and moments inked onto the worn pages that once represented an inevitable fate.

I would never change our story.

....

The day Louis and I turned into an 'us' wasn't anything spectacular.

Most high school students wouldn't remember the conditions so clearly - how there was a bitterness in the air that crept into your body and scratched at the few memories of warmth and Summer that you still had plaguing your mind; making each day of the Cheshire winter more insufferable than the one before - but I paid attention to the weather like it was a religious experience.

I paid attention not because I was hoping and praying for a day off due to dangerous conditions, or because I wanted to know if I could get away with one layer of socks on my feet instead of the usual two.

No; I paid attention, because I knew the only way I could really take a risk or feel something was through how I dressed - anything more audacious was like playing with fire in my 'fragile condition' (as my mother liked to put it).

So on that fateful January morning, I covered my skin in nothing more than a pair of white skinny jeans, and a thin floral button-up, because if I couldn't feel the sting of a scraped elbow after trying to run faster than my clumsy legs were capable of, then I was going to imitate it as best I could with the bite of the freezing snow against my unprotected skin.

Maybe the reason I was so drawn to Louis despite our differences was because while he seemed to question almost everything around him; he never asked why I showed up to school everyday with my skin burning a bright red from being ripped at by the unforgiving wind, or why I didn't just put on a coat. He never asked why I was allowed to skip gym class while every other student was forced to push and shove against his fellow classmates as they played football for what seemed like the millionth time that year, and he never asked why I spent just as much time at the doctor's office as I did at school.

Everyone knew I was different; he was the only one who didn't push, didn't question.

He made me feel sane - like it was somehow okay that I walked the line between healthy and dying of hypothermia, and that in my mind it was perfectly justified. 

Of course, no matter how much I wanted to be normal, I knew I wasn't - Louis knew I wasn't; so six months into our relationship, I told him everything. 

"Osteogenesis Imperfecta."

I don't think I'll ever forget the way his face fell as I told him more about the disease - how I was being held back from so many experiences, because my body was too weak to take care of it's own design. I felt like a villain as the words fell from my lips - every syllable making the situation more and more depressing, and Louis' features grow more and more grim.

I wanted him to hold me, and tell me it was all going to be okay, or to push me away, and tell me we just weren't going to work out. I needed a solid reaction that could give me a sense of peace; letting me know I made the right decision... that isn't what I got.

He didn't yell, or scream, or even choke out whatever was clawing at his mind. In fact, he didn't say anything. He just got up and left. 

We were a month away from our one year anniversary when it happened. 

Louis and I had our fights. It didn't matter how many romantic tattoos covered his body - couples have disagreements. It's inevitable. This one was worse than the others, though. This is the one that made everything change.

"H, you're being ridiculous! If I want to go swimming at the old quarry with some friends, I will. It's perfectly safe, and even if it wasn't, it isn't your decision!"

"People get hurt there all the time, Lou. I just don't want you to end up in the hospital from trying to do some ridiculous flip off the ledge and into the water! Is it so crazy that I don't want my boyfriend getting seriously injured or worse?" 

He was yelling. I was yelling. 

It was all very dramatic. 

Looking back at it, I was probably being a bit overprotective, but it was hard for me to remember that not everyone had to live their life in a plastic bubble like I did. Louis made sure I remembered.

"I'm not going to get hurt! Not everyone's body is as weak and pathetic as yours! I'm going!" 

And he did. For the second time, he walked out of my room and left me alone and speechless - only this time he wasn't leaving quietly with all his thoughts still trapped in his mind. No, this time he was leaving with everything laid out on the table.

I don't know how long I sat there for, or how many stages of reckless I had to have been feeling to do what I did.

The only thing I can clearly remember is that when I left my house that night I had a mindset of pure determination. It coursed through my body, and caused my veins to thrum with energy. I felt like I was floating, and I loved every second of it.

Perhaps I somehow knew it was going to be the last night I was going to live instead of merely exist, and that's why I was able to let go, and just enjoy it for what it was; maybe I was just stupidly infatuated with the idea of normal. 

As I said earlier, I have never struggled with remembering every day after that first tattoo. That night is no exception - it's just the emotions that get lost on me.

When I left my house there was no set plan. It just kind of developed on it's own like a picture would when left alone to dry in a dark room. 

However, as I found myself walking down the streets of Cheshire, at a time where all life was either asleep or just passing from buzzed to full out drunk, I knew it was going to be a night to remember; so I did what Louis always did for the days he knew he'd never want to forget.

I got a tattoo.

Maybe if after getting the rose engraved onto my skin I let the evening end, I wouldn't be where I am today. Maybe I would have ended up here anyhow.

You can't change the past, though; so I suppose the only way to know would be to go and question God, himself (and as each day passes of me lying here, that opportunity seems to be drawing closer and closer). 

Dousing a new tattoo in dirty water is bound to get you an infection, or severe discomfort at the very least. Combine that with a thirty foot drop into a quarry filled to brim with millions of unnameable bacteria and a disease that makes your bones more like glass than, well, bone, and you've got a sure-fire way to never be okay again.

For others, it was a disaster they'd do anything to avoid. For me, it was black magic, and I was the enchanter. How could I resist?

The next time I was awake (that I can recall), I was in the ICU.

The walls were white, the blankets were white. the heart monitor was white - the only thing that suggested any life in the room aside from the persistent beeping of my pulse bouncing across a screen of green and black, was the sleeping boy beside me.

He was hunched over in a chair pushed so closely to my bed you'd think the two were connected, and his mussed hair suggested he'd been running his hands through it almost constantly. 

He didn't look healthy...not that I was one to talk. 

I wanted to simply watch and let him rest. God knew he needed it, but it was almost as if his body was a missing part of my own; as soon as I stirred, he was did as well.

"You're awake." He sat up in his chair, and his blue eyes met my green ones for what felt like the first time in years.

"Yeah."

We sat there for awhile, just taking each other in. It's what I imagined being reunited with a loved one after their return from war. I didn't need him to say, or do anything. I just needed him to be there.

All but one of his tattoos after that day came from conversations rather than adventures.

One of my favorites was from the day the doctor told me that I wasn't getting better, that my condition was only worsening, and I should 'start thinking about the future'. 

He wasn't referring to my future - I wasn't going to have one.

Louis cried a lot that day, and it wasn't until the wee hours of the morning that we talked again in hushed tones as my mother slept on a cot in the corner of the room. 

The woman was a miracle worker, I swear. Usually they only allow family to stay with the patient, but with one stern talk to a nurse and some heavily shed tears with my main doctor, Louis was allowed to stay for as long as he wanted.

"I'm sorry, Lou." I turned my head toward him where he had squeezed his way next to me on my bed - somehow managing to maneuver around all the tubes I and buttons I had attached to my body.

"For what?"

"For us having so little time together." It was my fault we weren't going to have a senior prom photo together. It was my fault we wouldn't celebrate Louis' birthday together in a month. It was my fault any hope of a future between us was put out like flame without any oxygen. 

"We have all time in the world, H." His voice was strained. He knew he was lying, but he didn't want to be.

"Time doesn't really exist at all, does it?" 

My question hung in the air unanswered, and I'm almost positive that if you were to walk into my hospital room, you would be able to clearly see it written across the ceiling in fading, black ink.

The next day, Louis left the hospital only to return hours later with a small clock tattooed on his inner wrist.

The last tattoo he got for us didn't show up until two weeks later.

"Why'd you get it?" His voice was soft as his fingers traced over the rose on my left arm, treating it as though it was going to disappear at any moment.

"It's just a big metaphor... I'm the rose, right? Because I'm delicate, I guess, and you're the thorns, because you're hard on the outside, but on the inside your intentions are good - you protect me." 

He held me tighter in response.

He slept at home that night. Saying he had an appointment he needed to be ready for in the morning - it was the worst night of sleep I've ever had in my entire life.

Louis didn't return until late the following evening - my mother out of the room on a phone call, and myself teetering on the edge of consciousness - and quietly slid under the covers next to me.

"Look what I got for you." He sounded incredibly scratchy, as if he had spent the last hour either yelling, or crying, or both.

It was deja vu as he held his arm out for me to examine his skin that was no longer it's natural tan color, but instead dark and black.

"I looked up nautical tattoos to go with your rose. Now we match." There was a smile in his voice that had yet to make an appearance on his face - held back by the devastating reality that was our love. 

"I love it." 

That was a just over week ago, but Louis and I are still lying here in the same position. I know it's coming, he knows it's coming, the doctors know it's coming, but that isn't making it any easier. 

I don't think I'd want it any other way, though. To spend my last day with Louis by my side is really all I could ever ask for. 

The time that I've gotten to spend with Louis has changed who I am in ways I've never felt through stories I've never told (and never will tell). 

He's special. Not in the way that he doesn't quite understand what other people can easily, but in the way that makes him seem more like a glimmer of light than human - you just have to pull back that first layer of black to be completely blinded.

So it's as I lay here - with one glimmer of light latched onto my side, tears silently streaming down its face, and one glimmer of light just ahead of me, shining bright and drawing closer - that I decide he didn't tear back my wallpaper to reveal never ending gray. No, he tore away who I thought I was to reveal an infinite world of being nothing while being everything at the same time. 

My world, my everything, starts fading away at the same time as I do - except him. 

He's time. He's infinite. 

And yet, in my mind now, he's not there at all. 

-Louis' POV-

His aesthetic was simple blogs with flower crowns and quotes about the meaning of life. His mind was set to give each and every person a chance at a first impression, and how many experiences the world was holding for him. He wore bright colors and pastels like they were a permanent part of him - the colors that filled his body bleeding into the outside world. He loved wandering around art exhibits - noticing that as the paintings got darker the brush strokes grew more aggressive and obstructive. He saw things differently.

I don't believe in opposites, because if Harry was mine, then how on earth did I make my home in his body and find myself in his soul? 

We shouldn't have worked out - we just shouldn't have - but it was written in the stars, and Harry always was a dreamer.


End file.
